"The
U.S. government is in the power business [but] power, important
though it is, is to be the mere spine of the whole living animal."

James
Agee

[Archive]

The
Great Experiment

In
a poetic 1933 article for Fortune magazine, author James Agee introduced
TVA to the world at large

By
Jack Neely

Fortune
magazine took a big chance that fall, sending a 23-year-old kid fresh
out of Harvard to report on one of the biggest business stories of
the
century. The assignment  to cover FDRs complex and ambitious
new program, the Tennessee Valley Authority  might have seemed an
especially unlikely one to give this particular young man, who in 1933
was known mainly for his emotional poetry (Permit me voyage, Love,
into your hands . . . ). An untried reporter, he had never shown
any particular aptitude for thermodynamics or erosion control or federal
policy issues. Still, Fortune sent the tall young poet to Knoxville,
Tenn.,
to tell the world about TVA.

At
least Jim Agee knew his way around. Hed spent some time in Knoxville  after
all, he was born there. His father, a postal employee, had worked in one
of the buildings that would later serve as TVAs headquarters. The
Fortune assignment gave Agee his first excuse to revisit his hometown
since the year he was 16 and his widowed mother pulled him out of old
Knoxville High to finish up at swanky Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

Agee spent a week
in the Tennessee Valley region doing research, and when he returned to New York he filed
an unforgettable story, one unlike any other that had ever appeared
in
Fortune. It began with a poetic 94-word sentence tracing the entire course
of the Tennessee River. In Agees description, the river roared like
blown smoke through the floodgates of Wilson Dam, to slide becalmed along
the crop-cleansed fields of Shiloh, to march due north across the spreading
marshes toward the valleys end where finally, at the toes of Paducah,
in one wide glass golden swarm the water stoops forward and continuously
dies into the Ohio.

Again, that was in
a business article. To indulge Fortunes editors, Agee eventually
got around to the workaday part of TVAs great experiment,
describing flowage ratios and bond revenues in his remarkably thorough
piece. Now available in the book James Agee: Selected Journalism (UT
Press), the story is full of colorfully quotable Ageeisms about TVA:

In
this enormous machine the balance wheel is human.

TVA
has put a bold foot through a beehive of problems both practical and
ethical.

The
US government is in the power business [but] power, important though
it is, is to be the mere spine of the whole living animal.

Eighteen months later,
Agee returned to write a much longer follow-up called TVA: Work
in the Valley, which included surprisingly intimate descriptions
of TVAs headquarters and of the directors themselves:.

Walk
up sooty Gay Street and turn down smudgy Union and on past Market Square
straight on to the new Sprankle Building. . . . Go upstairs and through
the brisk bare corridors and there, if you are lucky, you will find
yourself face to face with the very men who run this show. They are
three: two of them soberly dressed, sixtyish, one rather sportily dressed,
in his middle 30s. The man with the broad hands, the delicately cut
aquiline head is Dr. Arthur Morgan. . . . The man with the drawled,
humorists mouth and the stringy body of a farmer is Dr. Harcourt
Morgan. . . . The quick-handed, quick-faced man is David Lilienthal
. . . 

Anyone who reads
Agees poetic descriptions of TVA wont be surprised to learn
that he didnt remain a business reporter for long. But those TVA
assignments may have had a decisive effect on his writing career. His
business trips to Knoxville seem to have prompted a sentimental journey
to the scenes of his childhood. In 1935, shortly after revisiting Knoxville
for his second TVA article, Agee wrote a prose poem called Knoxville:
Summer 1915. Nationally published, this vignette from his early
years would later be set to music by the composer Samuel Barber. The piece
eventually served as the beginning of what may be Agees best-known
work today, the autobiographical novel A Death in the Family. This
bittersweet memoir of his east Tennessee childhood won the Pulitzer Prize
for literature.

Knoxville has not
forgotten James Agee, who would have turned 90 in the fall of 1999. Earlier
in the year, the city renamed the old 15th Street James Agee Street
in
his honor. And down at the new waterfront development is a marble marker
inscribed with a bit of Agees prose. Its an excerpt from
the long, sinuous description of the Tennessee River that began his
first
Fortune story about TVA.

Jack
Neely is a Knoxville-based writer and historian. He is the author of three
books: Knoxvilles Secret History, Secret History
II, and The Marble City. His column, Secret History,
appears weekly in Metro Pulse, Knoxvilles alternative newspaper.

Name
that artifact

The
TVA Historic Collection includes a host of items that reflect
the technological advances of the 20th century. Can you identify
this artifact from the TVA collection?